Image series 13 / 2020: Monet’s London

Orientation towards Reality

22 March 2020
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By: Bettina Pfleging

The French painter Claude Monet had already visited London in the early 1870s. From 1899 he spent three consecutive winters in the city for several weeks. Here, too, he deliberately sought views whose painterly realisation was a challenge, and which seemed to him ideal for exploring the most subtle effects of colour and light. He always wanted to capture his experience of the moment in situ. Even though the paintings became increasingly abstract in the course of his life, they were based on observation and remained oriented towards reality. Because of to the constantly changing London weather, he initially left his paintings in the stage of unfinished oil sketches, which he reworked and completed after his return to France.